Thursday, June 29, 2006

It is very nice to see that Kuwaiti women are now allowed to vote in parliamentary elections. This hasn't always been the case. A journalist who visited the country in the 1980s was appalled to see that women had to walk ten paces behind their husbands but things changed radically after Saddam's invasion and when she returned in the 1990s women walked ten paces in front of their husbands. She was thrilled at the new status afforded to women and asked a passerby what had caused this sexual revolution. "landmines!" he replied.

These workplace rampages, in which an employee blasts his coworkers, are now a regular feature of American life, yet they are still grossly misunderstood and oddly ignored.........What changed in the US workplace isn't a sudden influx of guns on the market, or an influx of psychos in the workplace, but rather the most obvious and powerful cultural force of all: Reaganomics.

Update: I've just read the comments to Ames's piece and discovered that the man responsible for the massacre was a recent convert to a new religion. Can anyone possibly guess which one?

Sunday, June 25, 2006

I've never been overly impressed by Newspapers which view exposing classified security information as "speaking truth to power" regardless of the necessity for confidentiality that may pertain to areas such as counter terrorism. Therefore I yield to no one in my contempt for the New York Times's decision to offer a helping hand to terrorists by exposing a financial tracking program.

However the noisiest of the New York Times's critics in this matter is far more intricately connected to terrorism:

The fact that this evil man who supports the murder and torture of women and children, who is on the payroll of a terrorist organisation has the gall to condemn anyone for not being sufficiently committed to defeating terrorism is breathtaking. Say what you like about the New York Times but they aren't actually having a direct debit from Al Quaeda like this corrupt terrorist.

Friday, June 23, 2006

I was born in 1979 , looking at the wikipedia entries for different years since then, I only remember two of the events from 1986, Diego Maradona's "Hand of God" goal (or the Aygo Maradona, as I thought he was called back then) and the Challenger disaster. On the other hand I can remember loads of events from 1987 so presumably that is when I became aware of the outside world.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

This report on the future of Canada's public broadcasting, CBC, contains a lot of ideas that should be applied to the BBC.

The CBC should stop broadcasting professional sports and eventually cut all advertising so it no longer competes with private networks, a Senate committee recommended yesterday..........CBC-TV should be a public broadcaster that fills niches that no one else can or will fill," Ms. Fraser said after tabling the report, which called on the CBC to be realistic about its role. "Not addressing mandate and budget issues simply pushes the CBC, particularly its television services, to chase for ratings and thus to duplicate services offered by the private sector," the report concluded

There is no justification for public broadcasting other than to perform tasks that cannot be done adequately by the private sector. If one looks at the magnificent quality of the best US television dramas there is no comparison with what the turgid shows BBC are producing. In sport does anyone believe that the BBC's performance is anywhere close to matching that of SKY?As it is the BBC spends ridiculous amounts of money for a very meagre return.

Monday, June 19, 2006

Like many people I find the main commentators for ITV and the BBC to be horrible to listen to. My first response was similar to Iain Dale's suggestion, promote the better ones.

In a flash of inspiration this afternoon I realised this was completely wrong, we should get rid of them altogether. Most of the information they convey is pretty obvious to anyone with eyes in their head, anything else can be flashed up on the screen in writing. Commentary is superfluous. You are probably thinking that you don't want to just listen to crowd noise, I agree, therefore we should replace the commentary with a musical score!

Each player is given his own theme music which is played whenever he has the ball, a bit like in 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly' where Ennio Morricone gives each character slightly different music which is played in subtley different styles depending on the mood. I was thinking of "Jaws" for Thierry Henry, a samba beat for Ronaldinho or the "Laurel and Hardy" theme for Phil Neville.

Friday, June 16, 2006

With all the furore about leniant sentences this week a self serving claim has cropped up regarding the granting of parole to life prisoners. John Mortimer made the argument on The Week and someone called Mark Leech from an ex prisoners organisation Unlock made a similar point on the Jeremy Vine programme this wednesday, to quote Mr Leech:

The only way our prisons can maintain order, security, discipline and control is to give prisoners the opportunity of early release.

The sort of people who will be too dangerous for a prison if they don't have the incentives they wish, it is hardly safe to unleah them on the general public. It's as though bomb disposal experts decided that their job would be made safer if they let the public handle the trickier devices.

Now after several hours "research" on the web I have discovered that more attractive prostitutes than Heather Mills make no more than a £1000 a night. So has the price of hookers come down in the last 2 decades or have the figures invented by someone to make the transactions sound less sordid?

I've avoided linking to other blogs in my posts up until now because my first attempt at blogging in 2002 disintegrated into saying "x has something really good to say about y", but I'm going to start doing so from time to time now. Starting off with Laban Tall's who has three excellent posts. About the imaginary wife beating football fans and acceptable nationalism.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Iraq's leading minuteman Musab al-Zarqawi was murdered by Bu$Hitler's minions today. As I'm too caught up in grief to adquetely respond to this I will let the wise people from the BBC's 'Have Your Say' mouth the cliches for me.

Bush and Blair should be ashamed.

Mr Al-Zarqawi may not have been a particularly nice person, but to parade the person of a recently murdered man is shocking and will fuel the insurgency even more.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

he publishers of the Daily Ireland newspaper have launched a £3 million claim against the British government over the denial of advertising revenue. Yes, everyone's favourite bunch of media Provo apologists are OUTRAGED that Her Majesty's Government has not been spending 200k a month with them since their rag came to market last year.

On a whim I decided to do a google news search for the phrase "Government Announced" in the hope of picking up the latest government gimmicks. I see from the Mirror that:

To help the fight yobbish behaviour, the Government announced nuisance neighbours would face losing benefits.Anyone evicted for anti-social conduct would lose cash entitlements unless they went to anger management classes.

The thing is I know full well that this is not going to happen, the government know full well that this is not going to happen and the press know full well it is not going to happen but maintaining the illusion of action is hardwired into the government so everyone plays along until it is reannounced next year.

Monday, June 05, 2006

1 Failed State.An overwhelmingly muslim populationFeuding Warlords.United Islamist Opposition.No International Presence since a superpower left a few years earlier.

Stir it all together and what do you get? Well in Afghanistan we got the Taliban. In Somalia:

An Islamist militia says it has seized Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, after weeks of fighting against an alliance of warlords allegedly backed by the US.

Strategy Page was noting the similarities between the behavoiur of the islamist groups in Afghanistan and Somalia last month:

The Islamic Courts militias are doing a full Taliban. In addition to forcibly shutting down bars, theaters and video stores in areas they control, they are blaming everything that has gone wrong in Somalia on Israel, Ethiopia (the usual fall guy in this part of the world) and the United States.

The parallels are obvious. The extent to which this militia controls Somalia yet is unclear but if it emerges that they are now the effective rulers of the country we cannot afford to let the mistakes of the past be repeated, they must not be allowed to have a country to control. The Taliban's alliance with Al Qaeada led to the latter having a secure base from which tens of thousands of potential terrorists were trained, allowing it to happen was the biggest failing of the Western powers in the 1990s and ultimately led to 9/11.

The 'Islamic Courts' are not of course identical to the Taliban, they are more divided and don't have direct foreign backing in the manner that the Taliban did, but it is a worrying development nonetheless.

Looking at the World Cup, I can't help but noticing that France have a very good draw, good players and a significant amount of experience, so I'm going to put some money on them to win. I realise they haven't been playing well but lots of winning teams don't perform well intil the actual competition begins. Although anyone can comment here, this post is as much so I can point to it in a month's time if I win and gloat (or ignore completely if I'm wrong).

Saturday, June 03, 2006

Tony and Cherie Blair are to meet the Pope, when asked whether he would enjoy meeting with someone whose claims of infallibility have caused controversy, the pontiff said he didn't mind. I just can't wait to see the Pope's face when Cherie presents him with the appearence fee.

Update (Monday 10:47): Great minds think alike, and so do feeble minds. I was watching Have I Got News For You tonight and saw the appearence fee joke made by one of the guests. The show went out on Friday originally so I can't claim to have been plagiarised. I didn't see the Friday broadcast so I'm not a plagiarist either but my humour is generic and obvious.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Much of the international media was sympathetic to the claims that Sylvio Berlusconi's government contained political extremists and had a cavalier disregard for the rule of law. There was a certain amount of truth in both allegations. The new left wing government has already surpassed Berlusconi in both respects: